Ticketfly Promises 30 Percent Lower Fees Than Ticketmaster

The merger between the country’s largest ticketing firm, Ticketmaster, and its largest event promoter, Live Nation, appears to have the unintended side effect of scaring some promoters and venue owners from doing business with the behemoth.

And that’s sending them to the doors of smaller companies like Ticketfly.

“Ticketfly is a great option for anyone who doesn’t want their competitor selling their tickets,” said 9:30 Club’s Seth Hurwitz, a client of the company, in a statement. “These guys were the first to sell tickets online and not surprisingly they have a ton of great new ideas and positive energy. It’s precisely guys like these that this industry needs.”

It’s live music’s dirty little secret: The artists you love insist on the fees you hate.

Co-founded in 2008 by Andrew Dreskin (also a co-founder of TicketWeb, the first online ticketing service, acquired by Ticketmaster in 2000) and former TicketWeb COO Dan Teree, Ticketfly recently raised $3 million in Series A funding and has poached more than 50 venues from Ticketmaster/Live Nation including The 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., and, more recently, the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, a top-ten amphitheater for ticket sales nationwide.

We know: All you care about is whether this will lead to a reduction in the much-reviled service fees that Live Nation/Ticketmaster tacks on to each ticket sale. The answer is a qualified “yes.”

Ticketfly’s service fees typically range around 30 percent lower than those of Ticketmaster/Live Nation, although it can’t do away with those fees completely. Artists, managers, promoters and venue owners demand a share of those fees, and if Ticketfly killed them completely, they wouldn’t be able to compete.

It’s live music’s dirty little secret: The artists you love insist on the fees you hate.

Notably, Ticketfly does away with Ticketmaster’s print-at-home charge, which continues to shock and dismay Live Nation Entertainment customers by charging them for the privilege of doing light cashier work and printing tickets with their own printers, ink and paper.

Ticketfly also intends to differentiate itself from Ticketmaster by making it fast and easy for venues and promoters to update show information and promulgate it on social networks, whereas according to Dreskin, it takes three to five days to enter a show on Ticketmaster, which some venues still do by fax. Ticketfly also plans to offer discounts to fans who post ticketing links to their social networking friends, which it plans to roll out by summer’s end. He says people already do that “in great numbers” even without financial incentives.

Between Ticketfly and Eventbrite, Live Nation Entertainment faces some much-needed competition. Now the market will determine whether these nimbler, socially adept companies are a match for Live Nation/Ticketmaster’s claim that it can fill more seats by combining promotion and ticketing as a result of its marriage of convenience (fees).